Marine Goes Veggie

Joins Fellow Poets & Writers
At Fiddleheads March 10

Grand Opening Events Begin
Feb. 3 At Natural Foods Supermarket


Where can you find a red-blooded former Marine, Vietnam Vet who prepares for power-lifting competitions by carbing up on celery and cherries, and builds muscle by consuming mass quantities of whey protein?

Soon you will see him at Fiddleheads Natural Supermarket in Litchfield, Ct., reading poetry, contemplating the universe or just looking out the window from the community room.

Ron Winter, who lifts in the lifetime drug free category, tells one and all that veggie-based complex carbs and natural fiber are the keys to staying strong and healthy.

"Sure, I love many veggies and pure grains," Winter said. "Still, even though I heard Fiddleheads has the best and freshest broccoli around, there is no way I will ever eat that stuff. Try and make me!"

Red meat? Full of hormones and antibiotics? No whey? Or NO! Whey!* And Soy!
[see discussion of Whey below.]

Winter will read from his Vietnam memoir Masters of the Art, A Fighting Marine's Memoir of Vietnam, published by Random House and now available in paperback. He may share a couple poems from his collection, Incoming Is Outgoing to the Other Side.

The growing list of poets and writers who will read March 10 at Fiddleheads includes David Cappella, Jim Scrimgeour, Tom Hazuka, Ravi Shankar and Elizabeth Thomas. Appearing with the poets and writers will be a jazz combo made up of local teenagers. Winter, Scrimgeour, Hazuka, Shankar and Thomas have all served as judges for the IMPAC-CSU Young Writers Trust competition, which has an entry deadline of Feb. 1 this year. For more information, see www.ctyoungwriters.org

Masters of the Art is a frank and accurate look at Marine operations in northern I Corps in 1968 at such battle sites as Khe Sanh, The Demilitarized Zone and the A Shau Valley. Masters of the Art is true to the Marine tradition of Semper Fidelis, Always Faithful.

The book portrays Marine Corps boot camp training at Parris Island as a growth experience that enabled the author to meet and overcome later challenges in life, rather than an emotionally numbing experience that produced little more than mindless killers. Drill instructors are portrayed as the fear-inducing masters of military training, yet they also deal with the rigors of producing new Marines with a touch of true humanity.

Winter, a descendant of Scottish Highlanders, grew up in the farming country of upstate New York. He gave up an academic scholarship at SUNY Albany in 1966 to join the marines and fight in Vietnam, where he served as a helicopter machine gunner, flying 300 missions, and earning numerous decorations, including 15 Air Medals, Combat Aircrew Wings, and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry. After Vietnam he returned to his studies earning undergraduate degrees in Electrical Engineering and English Literature.

In a two-decade journalism career that included stints as investigative reporter, supervising editor, and columnist, Winter received several prestigious awards and a Pulitzer nomination. He currently works as a writer specializing in media relations and is a fierce advocate of veterans' rights. Winter speaks regularly to school and community groups on the history of the Vietnam.

Grand opening events at Fiddleheads include tastings of gelato, all juice spritzers, chili sauces and high-end specialty cheeses. Samples of natural toothpastes and bar soaps will be handed out. The March family farm of Bethlehem will offer native fruits and vegetables, as well as homemade jams, jellies, spices and syrups. Also, an acupuncturist will discuss the traditional Chinese medical technique for unblocking chi, or energy.

For a complete schedule and background, see the Fiddleheads website, www.fiddlheadsmarket.com

Fiddleheads Market reached into the natural and organic food industry for two managers who opened its doors - quietly -- to the public on Jan. 15. Since that time they have been gearing up for the grand opening celebration beginning Feb. 3.

Produce manager Kurt Brown of Litchfield boasts 17 years experience in the field. Brown helped expand the Four Season Farm in Darien from a seasonal stand to a specialty store. He has also served as produce manager of Peters Weston Market and Davis IGA in Kent.

Brown has been working with local farms to identify the best sources of produce, as well as specialty items including maple syrup and honey. Among the unusual fare Brown is planning to stock are non-conventional cooking greens like bok choy, golden beets, chickery and escarole.

Prepared foods manager Janet Candela of West Hartford began her career 25 years ago working for a European importer of gourmet foods in New York. Candela then moved into the natural foods arena, running a catering business called "Good Vibrations - Food Foundations," for 12 years in Burlington. Her company specialized in whole foods, whole grains and organics.

Candela has also consulted with doctors and patients to develop special diets for those with health issues such as allergies, fatigue or chemical sensitivities. She said her menu for Fiddleheads will include "traditional comfort food, but with a little spin," along with "atypical health foods made from scratch with a wide variety of spices and whole grains."

Fiddleheads hours and days of operation are as follows: Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Saturday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Sunday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. The store is at Litchfield's Village Green complex, Route 202, down the hill from Dunkin' Donuts and Blockbuster.

Patrons of Northwest Connecticut's natural and organic supermarket might get distracted staring at the museum-quality floor. An emerald green, terrazzo-style floor has been built and installed by Chris Krone of Concrete Supplement Co.

The mosaic features uniquely blended elements of marble, glass and stone. The "F" for Fiddleheads in the community room will glow in the dark. The emerald green texture with smaller glass aggregates will continue throughout the store.

"I want customers to have a one-of-a-kind experience," said Krone, whose client base is in Fairfield County and New York.

Fiddleheads secured zoning approval for the sale of prepared foods and to host educational events in the community room. Co-owners Stephanie Weaver and Anne Freeman said typical renovation issues for the new business led them to re-schedule the store's opening from November until mid-January.

"Our focus on this magnificent floor is reflected in quality throughout the entire store," Weaver and Freeman said in a joint statement.

The 5,700 square foot store features products including natural / organic fruits, vegetables, meats, poultry and fresh fish. There is a wide selection of local farm products, a salad bar, coffee, homemade breads and baked goods and prepared foods and meals to go. Specials include sushi, tappas, variety quiches and wholesome soups and stews.

"Fiddleheads is committed," Weaver said, "to become the flagship grocery and prepared foods store of Litchfield County -- in a way that promotes health through a wide range of products harvested and manufactured with integrity, fairness and responsibility, while respecting the environmental balance of the surrounding community."

The natural foods supermarket encourages awareness of the community's dietary, organic and other natural product choices, she said.

"Though its existence as a community center, Fiddleheads will support a healthy lifestyle through its retail products, its prepared food selections, its catering, and its health, cooking and kids' classes," Weaver said. "It will also provide meaningful economic support to the local population through employment opportunities as well as serving as a retail outlet for local farm products, manufacturers and industries committed to providing healthful products. The store seeks to be known for its innovative and health conscious products, its variety and its excellent service."

The natural foods supermarket provides a Community Room suitable for cooking classes, small venue concerts, wine / beer/ chili tastings and lectures. Cookbooks, nutrition books and a limited selection of fiction, non-fiction and poetry will also be offered. Dr. Georgia Day, owner of the Rainy Faye Bookstore & Gallery in Bridgeport and an assistant academic vice president at Fairfield University, will oversee the book operation. For more information, see www.rainyfaye.com

BACKGROUND ON THE PRINCIPALS IN THIS VENTURE:


Anne Freeman, owner of Anne's Place, LLC brings over 20 years of extensive experience within the food and beverage industry. She held the food service contract with the University of Connecticut Torrington Branch, providing a variety of prepared foods for students and staff on a daily basis as well as a full service catering menu. Additionally, Anne has been a personal chef for the past ten years and currently runs Anne's Place, a business which caters to specific client needs focusing on special dietary requirements and specific food preferences.

Anne has several years of event planning and catering experience through which she has acquired an extensive inventory of food and vendor contacts. Through her management of the restaurant, bar and banquet facility, Anne was successful in reinvigorating the Torrington Country Club, bringing about an unprecedented increase in wedding and event bookings. While in that management position, she developed the staff training manuals, and implemented the "Point of Sale" system that the Country Club still uses today. She also developed a food service program for all staff & faculty at The Education Connection. She prepared all menus for the Head Start program at that facility as well. She is a board member of the Litchfield County Women's Network (LCWN) and is responsible for its venue and menu planning. Through her tenure the LCWN has enjoyed its highest membership in its 25-year history.

Stephanie Weaver is the principal in the Law Offices of Stephanie M. Weaver, LLC, located in Litchfield, Ct. In her 19th year of practice, she concentrates on divorce and family law, as well as business law, preparing commercial loans for banks, and general real estate. She is General Counsel to the Litchfield County Board of Realtors, which stands at 650 members, and provides the organization with legal advice and assistance. A board member of the IMPAC-Connecticut State University Young Writers Trust, Stephanie helped the organization expand in 2000 from Litchfield County to cover the entire state.

In 1997, she formed a business venture with Alan Landau, and opened a New York-style athletic club in Litchfield. Now in its eighth year of operation, the club has become a treasured and valuable community member. Currently, she is renovating a farmhouse on 22 riverfront acres in central West Virginia for a bed and breakfast locale. She has served on many charitable organizations, including being a past president of the Northwest Connecticut YMCA. She will oversee the business of the venture, including its financial workings, and will provide legal support as needed.


*What the heck is whey?
From www.wikepedia.com

Whey or milk plasma is the liquid remaining after milk has been curdled and strained; it is a by-product of the manufacture of cheese or casein and has several commercial uses. Whey is used to produce ricotta and gjetost cheeses and many other products for human consumption. It is used as an additive in many processed foods, including breads, crackers and commercial pastry. In addition, whey is used as an animal feed. Whey proteins mainly consist of a-lactalbumin and ß-lactoglobulin. Depending on the method of manufacture, it may also contain glycomacropeptides (GMP).

The whey protein separated from this mixture is often sold as a nutritional supplement. Such supplements are especially popular in the sport of bodybuilding. Liquid whey contains lactose, vitamins, and minerals along with traces of fat. Researchers at Lund University in Sweden discovered that whey appears to stimulate insulin release. Writing in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. They also discovered that whey supplements can help regulate and reduce spikes in blood sugar levels among people with type 2 diabetes by increasing Insulin secretion.

BACKGROUND ON POETS & WRITERS APPEARING MARCH 10

Tom Hazuka
is the author of over 30 short stories, former co-editor of Quarterly West magazine, and author of two novels, including In the City of the Disappeared (Bridge Works Publishing Company, Inc., 2000), which draws on his experiences in Chile with the Peace Corps between 1978 and 1980. A professor of English at Central Connecticut State University, Mr. Hazuka has also co-edited two short story anthologies.

With CCSU Athletic Director Charles (C.J.) Jones Jr., Hazuka has also written A Method to March Madness: An Insider's Look at the final Four (Moonlight Publishing) that offers an incisive view of what happens behind the scenes at the NCAA's "Big Dance." Based on Jones' four decades of experience as a player, coach, university athletics director and close colleague of many big names in the sport, the book is filled with anecdotes and insights that cover the spectrum of Final Four activity over the years.
University of Connecticut Head Basketball Coach Jim Calhoun notes in his foreword to the book: "C.J. does a fine job of explaining the transformation of the tournament into the March Madness that it is today."
Co-author Hazuka points out: "I'm a big college basketball fan, so working on this book was fun for me. It was also interesting to write for the first time a book that wasn't fiction."

James R. Scrimgeour
is a Professor of English at Western Connecticut State University.

He has published a critical biography of Sean O'Casey (G. K. Hall) along
with numerous reviews and articles on poetry and drama.

He has also published seven books of poetry --
Entangled Landscapes , with John Briggs (Pudding House),
Brushstropkes of the Millennium (WCSU Foundation),
Dikel, Your Hands (Spoon River Poetry Press, 1979),
The Route (Pikestaff Press, 1996),
James R. Scrimgeour: Greatest Hits (Pudding House Press, 2001),
We Are What We Have Loved (Hanover Press, 2001),
Monet in the Twentieth Century (Pudding House, 2002),
and over 200 poems in anthologies and periodicals.

Scrimgeour served as Editor of Connecticut Review
from September 1992 - September 1995. He has written over a
poem per week since January 1993.

David Cappella
lives in the town of Manchester, CT. He is an Associate Professor of English at Central Connecticut State University. He has co-authored two books on the teaching of poetry with Baron Wormser: Teaching the Art of Poetry: The Moves (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000) and A Surge of Language: Teaching Poetry Day to Day (Heinemann, 2004). He is the winner of the 2004 Bright Hill Press Poetry Chapbook Competition, of which the first poem was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He has published poems in The Connecticut Review, The Bryant Literary Review, Diner and other journals.

Elizabeth Thomas
designs and teaches writing programs and workshops for schools and organizations throughout the U.S. These programs promote literacy and the power of the written and spoken word for all ages. Thomas is the founder of UpWords Poetry, an organization dedicated to creative arts programming, particularly for young writers. Her website is www.upwordspoetry.com

Thomas works with young writers and teachers throughout the country. She is the Connecticut Review Poet-in-Residence for the Naugatuck Public Schools this semester.

[www.connecticutreview.com
Connecticut Review is the literary journal of the
Connecticut State University System.
It is published twice annually, in the Fall and the Spring.]

During the 2005/2006 school year Thomas traveled the east coast presenting school workshops throughout New England, Georgia, Florida and the Florida Keys. She was a keynote speaker for the Florida Council of Teachers of English in October 2005 and the Florida Literacy Coalition in May 2006. She was a featured author at the Amelia Island, FL Book Festival and performed in Providence, Nantucket, NYC and Block Island.

In June, 2006 she coordinated the Writing/Poetry Program for the World Scholar-Athlete Games. Held for two weeks at the University of Rhode Island, young writers, athletes, instructors and coaches from around the globe (157countries were represented last year) work and play together. She taught at the Games in 2001 and 2003. Go to www.internationalsport.com for more information.

In 2004/2005 she was the poet-in-residence for Images of Cultural Identity (Capitol Region Educational Council/Bushnell) and worked with 5th grade students from Hartford, Newington and Farmington. She was Program Director for WordsAlive in the Middle, a program funded by Hartford Public Schools. The program brought 7th and 8th grade students from Lewis Fox Middle School in Hartford and Horace Porter School in Columbia together to read and write creatively.

She has presented poetry/performance workshops for YPI www.ypi.org,a co-educational, residential summer camp offering one and two week workshops for young people in grades 5 through 12, interested in writing and the visual/performing arts.
In July 2002 - 2004, Thomas co-hosted a multi-day workshop called 'The Spoken Word: Performance Poetry' for UConn's Confratute a summer institute for teachers from around the globe on enrichment learning and teaching.

From 1998 to 2001, Thomas was Program Director for Words Alive, a greater Hartford, CT in-school writing program. Six high schools were involved (New Britain, Wethersfield, Hartford, East Hartford, Weaver and South Windsor).The program hosted noted poets and writers Naomi Ayala, Martin Espada, Marc Smith, Jack Agueros, Gayle Danley, Claribel Alegria, Ernesto Cardinal, D.J. Renegade, Roger Bonair-Agard, Sara Holbrook, Wayne Karlin, Patricia Smith, Cheryl Savageau, Doug Anderson, Luis Rodriguez, Devorah Major, the Welfare Poets and others. It was sponsored through a grant provided by the Capitol Region Educational Council (CREC).

Thomas was a member of three CT National Poetry Slam teams (1994, 1995,1997), a member of the 1998 U.S. team that traveled to Sweden and an individual competitor at NPS in the 2003 (Chicago) and 2005 (Albuquerque).

She is an organizer/coach for Brave New Voices/National Youth Poetry Slam and Festival. She organized and hosted the 1st National Youth Poetry Slam in Hartford, CT in 1998. The event included teams from the CT, Washington DC, NYC and Worcester, MA and a team from the Navajo Indian Nation of New Mexico. Since 1998, she has traveled with the CT team to New Mexico, San Francisco, Ann Arbor, Chicago, Los Angeles and NYC. Brave New Voices 10 will be held in New Orleans in April 2007. Want more information, please send an email to: upwordspoetry@earthlink.net

As an advocate for youth in the arts, Thomas has presented workshops for the Florida Literacy Coalition, Florida Council of Teachers of English, New England Association of Teachers of English, College Explorers of the Florida Keys Community College, CT Commission on Culture and Tourism and The Connecticut Poetry Festival. She has worked with The Greater Hartford Academy of Performing Arts, Charter Oak Cultural Center, Bushnell Partners Program, Poetry Live/Litchfield Performing Arts, CT Commission - Master Teaching Artist Program, the Greater Hartford YMCA, Curbstone Press and the Greater Hartford Arts Council. She is a member of the executive board of the New England Association of Teachers of English, a writing mentor for the Sunken Garden Poetry Series/Young Poets Competition and a steering committee member/in-school artist for the Windham Area Poetry Project.

If you would like a brochure listing some of the workshops offerings, please email upwordspoetry@earthlink.net to request a copy.

As a poet and performer, her work continues to be featured throughout the U.S. A partial Calendar of upcoming readings and workshops is available. Her first book of poetry, 'Full Circle' was published in 2000 by Hanover Press. Two poems included in the book are Ebb Tide and Revelation . She is currently working on her second collection of poems and has just finished a book on creative writing for children and teachers entitled, 'If Only Red Could Talk'. For information on ordering, please email to upwordspoetry@earthlink.net.

Elizabeth is a poet who believes in the idea of "poetry as remedy and resource" and throughout her life uses writing as a tool to help understand things that don't make sense.

Ravi Shankar
is poet-in-residence and assistant professor of English at Central Connecticut State University. Shankar is the author of Instrumentality, a collection of poems published by Cherry Grove Collections in Cincinnati, Ohio. He has served as a judge in the IMPAC-CSU competition for several years and was keynote speaker in 2005.

He is a founding editor of the online journal of the arts "Drunken Boat"(http://www.drunkenboat.com). Among many awards won by Shankar are the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize and the Bennett Prize for Poetry at Columbia University. His critical work has appeared in Poets & Writers, Time Out New York, The Iowa Review, and The AWP Writer's Chronicle.


NY TIMES FEATURE ON RAINY FAYE

March 16, 2003 Sunday
Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section 14CN; Column 1; Connecticut Weekly Desk; Pg. 2

LENGTH: 982 words

HEADLINE: THE VIEW / From Bridgeport;
Reading Globally, Buying Locally

BYLINE: By JEFF HOLTZ

BODY:


GEORGIA F. DAY was frustrated with always having to go outside of Bridgeport to do her book shopping.

At the same time, business leaders in the city believed an independent bookstore would be another ingredient for the downtown area's revitalization.

A resulting convergence of the parties has led to the opening next month of Rainy Faye, the first full-service bookstore in the state's most populated city in a decade.

The store is owned by Dr. Day, an assistant academic vice president at Fairfield University, who is an admitted bookstore junkie who always wanted her own business.

"When I travel, no matter where I go, I always go to a bookstore," she said. "Being inside of a bookstore is a whole new world."

Dr. Day, who is also the co-host of two local radio shows, said the store's location alone, at 940 Broad Street, could make Rainy Faye a success. It is situated directly across from the main branch of Bridgeport's public library, with its 5,000 visitors a week, and near the Housatonic Community College, with 4,500 students and a faculty of nearly 200.

"This seems to be the right spot at the right time and the right thing for me," she said.

Dr. Day said the store will carry an eclectic selection of books and newspapers. She also plans to have appearances by authors, art exhibitions, live comedy, poetry, storytelling and jazz, adding that there will be an emphasis on affordable pricing and customer service.

"I'm going to become their personal valet and try and to get them something in 24 hours if we don't have it," Dr. Day said, referring to the customers.

Although there are specialty bookstores in the city, Bridgeport -- where the Walden bookstore chain was founded -- has been without a full-service store since a Barnes & Noble that served as the University of Bridgeport's bookstore closed in 1993.

"I just think it's appalling that the biggest city in the state hasn't had a full-service book store," said Michael A. Golrick, Bridgeport's chief librarian. "There are three schools in the city that have fallen below all of the state testing standards for math, reading and writing.

"It is a demonstrable fact that kids who read more will write better. The fact that we haven't a book store has decreased their opportunities to buy books."

Experts in both the book industry and economic planning contend that the locating of bookstore chains in suburban malls has left many cities in a similar situation.

Daniel B. Houston, a partner in Civic Economics, a planning and consulting firm in Austin and Chicago that has studied the effects of bookstores on local economies, said Rainy Faye could be good for Bridgeport.

"Nobody from a small community is going to drive past one book store to go to another, unless there is something special," he said. "In Bridgeport, and other cities like it, the goal is not to copy suburban retail. The goal is to be something different, something that is intrinsically better."

Mr. Houston said that for each dollar taken in, independent owners like Dr. Day put roughly 45 cents back into the local economy, as compared with 13 cents by a chain store.

"They have local accountants, use local banks, have local lawyers and spend on local advertising," he said. "They spend a lot of money that disappears overnight if you shop in a chain store."

The American Booksellers Association, which is in Tarrytown, N.Y., and represents more than half of the 2,500 independent booksellers in the nation, said marketing ideas like Dr. Day's had stabilized the industry in the last three years.

"A lot of the independent are just becoming smarter marketers," said Michael F. Hoynes, the association's marketing officer. "They're becoming better at database management and customers service."

Dr. Day's new neighbors believe the store will enhance the area.

Mr. Golrick has already met with Dr. Day about coordinating events. He said the store would help promote literacy and learning in the city and draw more authors to the library for speaking engagements.

"The bookstore will probably advertise itself as being across from the library, he said. "So I'll get a little piece of that, too."

Mr. Golrick also noted that an independent store would be especially beneficial.

"Independent bookstores are really important because they don't have the purchasing decisions made far away," he said. "Those local decisions can reflect the local community and its needs."

Housatonic Community College officials believe the store will enhance the students' experience.

"The mark of any vibrant college is the type of commercial development that springs up around it, especially bookstores and various arts centers," said Anson C. Smith, a spokesman for the college. "It sounds like Rainy Faye is going to be just that type of venue."

Philip J. Kuchma, the president of the Kuchma Corporation, which manages the Broad Street property for Peoples Bank, used a consultant to determine if a bookstore could work downtown.

He said the store must rely heavily on community outreach and product turnover to attract customers.

"It is incumbent upon the people who said we needed this to support it," Mr. Kuchma said.

Dr. Day does face challenges, however. With large retailers and supermarkets also selling books, independents now control only 15 percent of the market, according to the American Booksellers Association. More than half of the nation's independent bookstores have closed in the last decade.

Yet, after exhaustingly researching the project, Dr. Day remains positive.

"There's a particular type of person that goes to the independent bookstore," she said. "We have Stop and Shop, and yet I still shop at a small grocery store, only because of the customer service and the fact that there is a limited menu and I know exactly where to go. I think that will happen here

"Truthfully, already the space is too small," she added. "I need a new place already. I see it growing."

GRAPHIC: Photos: A real page turner: Georgia F. Day, left, Yesinia Rosado, a student reporter, and Philip J. Kuchma, right, discussing Rainy Faye, a bookstore that is set to open next month. Right, Dr. Day outside her new bookstore, which will have an eclectic selection of books and feature live comedy, jazz and storytelling. (Photographs by Douglas Healey for The New York Times)

Field Guide To Writing Flash Fiction Featuring Shouhua Qi, Tom Hazuka ...

Via
Bliggidy Blog


Forthcoming from Rose Metal Press

The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field.
Edited by Tara L. Masih.

Rose Metal Press

Bliggidy Blog Post

Flash Fiction From Contemporary China

Feature Story On Qi

Hazuka In Connecticut Review

Connecticut Review

Fiddleheads Poet Speaks

Poet Elizabeth Thomas
On Ray & Diane Show Friday

Broadcast Interview Notes Appearances
By 10 Poets & Writers Saturday
At Fiddleheads Natural Supermarket, Litchfield

Mornings with Ray and Diane
WTIC 1080 AM
http://www.wtic1080.com/

Nationally-renowned poet and performer Elizabeth Thomas is scheduled to appear on WTIC Radio's Ray & Diane show Friday at 7:20 a.m.

Thomas is the Connecticut Review Poet-in-Residence for the Naugatuck Public Schools and the founder of UpWordsPoetry, a program for young writers. Thomas and her group of young performance poets – also known poetry slammers – have performed at the Bushnell in Hartford and at venues in major cities throughout the United States.

Her radio interview will highlight an appearance Saturday with nine other poets and writers at Fiddleheads Natural Supermarket in Litchfield. Festivities begin at 10:45 a.m. with live jazz performed by a group of Litchfield High School students.

Thomas was a member of three CT National Poetry Slam teams (1994, 1995, 1997), a member of the 1998 U.S. team that traveled to Sweden and an individual competitor at NPS in the 2003 (Chicago) and 2005 (Albuquerque).

She is an organizer/coach for Brave New Voices/National Youth Poetry Slam and Festival. She organized and hosted the 1st National Youth Poetry Slam in Hartford, CT in 1998. The event included teams from the CT, Washington DC, NYC and Worcester, MA and a team from the Navajo Indian Nation of New Mexico. Since 1998, she has traveled with the CT team to New Mexico, San Francisco, Ann Arbor, Chicago, Los Angeles and NYC. Brave New Voices 10 will be held in New Orleans in April 2007.
Her first book of poetry, Full Circle was published in 2000 by Hanover Press. She is working on her second collection of poems and has just finished a book on creative writing for children and teachers entitled, 'If Only Red Could Talk.

Also appearing with Thomas Saturday at Fiddleheads are Tom Hazuka, Davyne Verstandig, Ravi Shankar, Lynn Hoffman, Ron Winter, Shouhua Qi, Jim Scrimgeour, Robin Cullen and David Cappella.

Several members of this group have been published in Connecticut Review and serve as judges for the IMPAC-CSU Young Writers competition.

Connecticut Review is the literary journal of the Connecticut State University System. It is published twice annually, in the Fall and the Spring.

By June 1 of this year, the IMPAC-CSU Young Writers Trust will have given more than $150,000 to Connecticut’s best young writers. Thousand-dollar winners include students from more than 50 schools. About 4,000 students have participated in the program since 1998.

Poets and writers in each of Connecticut’s eight counties win $1,000 prizes annually, awarded during ceremonies at the four CSU campuses. About a dozen finalists in prose and poetry from each county are invited to the regional ceremonies.

Those events for spring 2007 are as follows: Southern Connecticut State University, New Haven, April 23; Eastern Connecticut State University, Willimantic, April 24; Western Connecticut State University, Danbury, April 26; and Central Connecticut State University, New Britain, April 30.

Judging begins this week for county finalists and winners.

The 16 county winners – as well as their parents, families, teachers and friends – will be invited to the annual dinner at the Litchfield Inn. Grand prize winners – to be announced at the June 1 dinner – will also earn a trip to Dublin for events connected with the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Dublin Writers Festival.
#


Fiddleheads
Litchfield Community’s
Natural Supermarket
Village Green, Building E
Rte. 202, Litchfield, Connecticut
860-567-1900
www.fiddleheadsmarket.com

Fiddleheads Natural Supermarket celebrated its grand opening in February.

Fiddleheads hours and days of operation are as follows: Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Saturday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Sunday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. The store is at Litchfield’s Village Green complex, Route 202, down the hill from Dunkin’ Donuts and Blockbuster.

Patrons of Northwest Connecticut’s natural and organic supermarket might get distracted staring at the museum-quality floor. An emerald green, terrazzo-style floor has been built and installed by Chris Krone of Concrete Supplement Co.

The mosaic features uniquely blended elements of marble, glass and stone. The “F” for Fiddleheads in the community room will glow in the dark. The emerald green texture with smaller glass aggregates continues throughout the store.

“I want customers to have a one-of-a-kind experience,” said Krone, whose client base is in Fairfield County and New York.

“Our focus on this magnificent floor is reflected in quality throughout the entire store,” Weaver and Freeman said in a joint statement.

The 5,700 square foot store features products including natural / organic fruits, vegetables, meats, poultry and fresh fish. There is a wide selection of local farm products, a salad bar, coffee, homemade breads and baked goods and prepared foods and meals to go. Specials include sushi, tappas, variety quiches and wholesome soups and stews.

“Fiddleheads is committed,” Weaver said, “to become the flagship grocery and prepared foods store of Litchfield County -- in a way that promotes health through a wide range of products harvested and manufactured with integrity, fairness and responsibility, while respecting the environmental balance of the surrounding community.”

The natural foods supermarket encourages awareness of the community’s dietary, organic and other natural product choices, she said.

“Though its existence as a community center, Fiddleheads will support a healthy
lifestyle through its retail products, its prepared food selections, its catering, and its health, cooking and kids’ classes,” Weaver said. “It will also provide meaningful economic support to the local population through employment opportunities as well as serving as a retail outlet for local farm products, manufacturers and industries committed to providing healthful products. The store seeks to be known for its innovative and health conscious products, its variety and its excellent service.”

The natural foods supermarket offers a Community Room suitable for cooking classes, small venue concerts, wine / beer/ chili tastings and lectures. Cookbooks, nutrition books and a limited selection of fiction, non-fiction and poetry are offered. Dr. Georgia Day, owner of the Rainy Faye Bookstore & Gallery in Bridgeport and an assistant academic vice president at Fairfield University, oversees the book operation.

BACKGROUND ON THE FIDDLEHEADS PRINCIPALS:


Anne Freeman, owner of Anne’s Place, LLC brings over 20 years of extensive experience within the food and beverage industry. She held the food service contract with the University of Connecticut Torrington Branch, providing a variety of prepared foods for students and staff on a daily basis as well as a full service catering menu. Additionally, Anne has been a personal chef for the past ten years and currently runs Anne’s Place, a business which caters to specific client needs focusing on special dietary requirements and specific food preferences.

Anne has several years of event planning and catering experience through which she has acquired an extensive inventory of food and vendor contacts. Through her management of the restaurant, bar and banquet facility, Anne was successful in reinvigorating the Torrington Country Club, bringing about an unprecedented increase in wedding and event bookings. While in that management position, she developed the staff training manuals, and implemented the “Point of Sale” system that the Country Club still uses today. She also developed a food service program for all staff & faculty at The Education Connection. She prepared all menus for the Head Start
program at that facility as well. She is a board member of the Litchfield County Women’s Network (LCWN) and is responsible for its venue and menu planning. Through her tenure the LCWN has enjoyed its highest membership in its 25-year history.

Stephanie Weaver is the principal in the Law Offices of Stephanie M. Weaver, LLC, located in Litchfield, Ct. In her 19th year of practice, she concentrates on divorce and family law, as well as business law, preparing commercial loans for banks, and general real estate. She is General Counsel to the Litchfield County Board of Realtors, which stands at 650 members, and provides the organization with legal advice and assistance. A board member of the IMPAC-Connecticut State University Young Writers Trust, Stephanie helped the organization expand in 2000 from Litchfield County to cover the entire state.

In 1997, she formed a business venture with Alan Landau, and opened a New York-style athletic club in Litchfield. Now in its eighth year of operation, the club has become a treasured and valuable community member. Currently, she is renovating a farmhouse on 22 riverfront acres in central West Virginia for a bed and breakfast locale. She has served on many charitable organizations, including being a past president of the Northwest Connecticut YMCA. She will oversee the business of the venture, including its financial workings, and will provide legal support as needed.

Books By Fiddleheads Poets & Writers

Appearing 11 a.m. Sat., March 10, 2007

Reception and intermission entertainment
by local jazz combo

Fiddleheads Natural Supermarket
www.fiddleheadsmarket.com

55 Village Green Drive
Litchfield, CT
860-567-1900

* Ravi "I Don't Play The Sitar" Shankar, Instrumentality.

* Robin Cullen, Couldn't Keep It To Myself, Testimonies From Our Imprisoned Sisters, edited by Wally Lamb.

* Tom Hazuka, A Method To March Madness: An Insider's Look At The Final Four; The Road To The Island; City Of The Disappeared.

* Shouhua Qi, When The Purple Mountain Burns.

* Lynn Hoffman, Like Fire Catching Wind.

* Ron Winter, Masters Of The Art: A Fighting Marine's Memoir; Incoming Is Outgoing From The Other Side.

* Davyne Verstandig, Pieces Of The Whole; Provisions.

* Jim Scrimgeour, seven books of poetry including Greatest Hits.

* David Cappella, Teaching The Art Of Poetry; A Surge Of Language: Teaching Poetry Day By Day.

* Elizabeth Thomas, Full Circle.

JAZZ COMBO PERSONNEL:
Doug Slohm, bass; Ben Loomis, drums; Graham Meharg, piano; Will Katzin, alto sax; Alex Gros, alto sax.


Books by
The Fabulous Rainy Faye
www.rainyfaye.com
georgia_f_day@sbcglobal.net

For more background on the poets and writers,
Search Fiddleheads and / or the writers in archives
[Jan. archives: Marine Goes Veggie & West Hartford & Litchfield County Poets ... ]
@www.cooljustice.blogspot.com

Spring 07 Ct. Review

The Spring 2007 Issue of Connecticut Review will
arrive soon. Here are some snapshots of its
contents.

WCSU professor James R Scrimgeour, ESCU emeritis
Gray Jacobik join with other artists to explore
the intersections between images made by language
and the graphic image of painting and
photography. This special section encourages
seeing and creating from multiple perspectives.

In Raymond Mackenzie's personal essay, a
scholar's unexpected discovery of poet Christina
Rossetti's lock of hair in a library leads him on
a meditation about his father. "The main fact of
my father's life story is that it was a life of
chronic disappointment."

"I don't know if it was vandalism or theatrics
that urged the guitarist to hurl his instrument
to the floor of the stage and leap on it," says
Al Maginnes in his poem, "The Art of
Destruction," which is about the joy of tearing
down monuments.

CCSU author Tom Hazuka satirizes the zany work of
English professors in an oversaturated job
market. "Cissy Sue Gummoe, who taught fiction
writing on the strength of having published two
stories à clé in now defunct literary magazines
I'd never heard of (and who, she proudly informed
me, had once received a signed rejection note
from Playboy), sympathetically stroked my thigh
beneath the table."

"Would we risk our lives to save books. People
have." Poet Patricia S. Hohl ruminates on the ""
of recent large-scale book burnings in Sarajevo,
Cambodia and Iraq. "The past can be rewritten but
only if the documents of history are destroyed."

"One day I will not awake in my body as you know
it," advises the narrator in Margaret Gibson's
poem, "Transparent," a comforting look at how our
loved ones never really leave.

The boy in Edgar Martinez Schultz's short story
makes a startling discovery: "And that's when I
saw them. The pins. The German symbols, which I
had been raised to understand, hate, and scorn in
school, in my father's lockbox."

In her essay "The New Loneliness," Patricia
Foster argues that "it's absurd to assume that
friendships are easy."

Simon Van Booy writes about the hardships a young
boy faces when his mother dies and he struggles
to accept her death.

And this from poet Martha Collins' translation of
Ngo Tu Lap's evocative poem, Cherry Garden:

"In the night I opened my door
The blackbirds did not cry
Their heads hung down on their shoulders"

Also in the issue: The CSU and IMPAC prize
winners in poetry, fiction and essay.
---

www.connecticutreview.com
Connecticut Review is the literary journal of the
Connecticut State University System.
It is published twice annually, in the Fall and the Spring.

West Hartford & Litchfield County Poets Join Lineup March 10 @ Fiddleheads

Two more poets have joined the lineup
of poets & writers
reading Sat., March 10 @ Fiddleheads Natural Supermarket.

They are Lynn Hoffman and Davyne Verstandig.
Plz see bios, etc., below. Poems from Verstandig coming soon.

Fiddleheads Natural Supermarket

Visit the book section at Fiddlheads,
kiosks and shelves serviced by
the Fabulous Rainy Faye.

Rainy Faye Bookstore & Gallery

Grand opening events at Fiddleheads begin Feb. 3.

Hoffman and Verstandig join a jazz combo
and poets & writers
David Cappella, Jim Scrimgeour, Tom Hazuka, Ravi Shankar,
Elizabeth Thomas and Ron Winter.

See prior posts including, Marine Goes Veggie.
-----

Davyne Verstandig is a lecturer in English and Creative Writing at the UConn Torrington Campus.

She is also director of the Litchfield County Writers Project.

She has published two books of poetry, Pieces of the Whole and Provisions and has performed improvisational work “composing on the tongue” while painting simultaneously. She recently served on the board of Touchstone, a residential treatment facility for female juvenile offenders in Litchfield, Connecticut.

She is currently a Justice of the Peace.

Her website,

Davyne Verstandig

-----

New Poetry By Lynn Hoffman


AT THE DEPARTMENT OF MOTOR VEHICLES


I'm not the only person to notice
the foursome who can't manage
to complete a sentence without the "F" word
while they stand in line to renew their licenses.
I'm waiting for my daughter
to return from her driving test
when I hear someone say,
"Come on oh-vuh here,
Baby!
and sit on my face.
I'll show you how it's done,"
which even attracts the attention
of the workers behind the counter
who've trained themselves only to look up
to call the next person in line.

My daughter returns with a smile and good news.
Just as we take our seats near the camera,
one of the foursome sits down in front of us.
Seconds later, he's joined by his girl friend,
who parks her behind on his empty lap.
Their chatter resumes
at a decibel level no one can avoid.
Suddenly, the girl friend shrieks,
"Yo! Don't let your ding-dong
harden on my ass!"
which takes me back to the cereal aisle
at Stop & Shop,
somewhere between Cap'n Crunch and Cocoa Puffs,
when my soon-to-be husband and I
were seized with an urge
to kiss -
not a peck on the cheek,
or even the mouth,
but a deep-throated, tongue-thrashing kiss
in the middle of the aisle
on the day senior-citizens got their discount,
when a sudden, insistent finger
tapped me on the shoulder
and a frail voice scolded,
"That's disgusting!"
to which I sneered,
"No one forced you to watch!"
as we completed the act he so rudely interrupted
while the poor man
hobbled toward the checkout
with his box of Bran in one hand,
his container of Metamusil in the other.

--

From:
Like Fire Catching Wind
Antrim House
ISBN 978-0-9762091-8-8


Lynn Hoffman's Like Fire Catching Wind is a collection of poetry that has received acclaim from all quarters.

Sue Ellen Thompson says, "The settings for the poems in Like Fire Catching Wind range from the kitchen stove to the slopes of the Andes, and in between lie stories about what it means to be a wife, a mother, a daughter, and the granddaughter of Italian immigrants. Surprises abound – read 'Small Talk' and 'The Gift' – as do humor, tenderness, and awe. Lynn Hoffman's poems remind us that the ordinary is as deserving of poetry as the extraoraordinary, that it is only by listening closely to the conversations around us that we can hear our humanity speak."

Doug Anderson writes that "Lynn Hoffman's poems celebrate the hot ingot of life in what most people mistake as the ordinary – a hotdog vendor infused with Aphrodite, an insectival soldier healing from trauma in a Kafka cage of high tech medicine – you know, the things you think you see, but don't quite? She's got vision and she'll help you see. Keep this book close."

And Major Jackson has this to say: "Each poem in Lynn Hoffman's Like Fire Catching Wind makes observation and rememory a ritual of language and reverence. Her poetry stems from the shimmering, mystified world of our quotidian lives, yet is reconstituted with feeling and stabilized by her imaginative powers until we, ourselves, are reborn anew and human."

Lynn Hoffman has studied with Steve Straight at Manchester Community College and attributes much of her success as a writer to him. Writing has been in her blood from early on. As she says, "Writing is my obsession, though poetry is a relatively new venture, which makes it all the more ironic that my first and only book is a collection of poems. I wondered if I would live long enough to see one of my books in print. So did my parents and siblings. My children just gave up on me. No more wondering.

"I write because I cannot not write – plays, YA novels, and short fiction as well as poems. I don't have rituals or a special room (although I do prefer a Uni-ball Vision Elite Fine Point with blue-black ink). I write at the dining room table, in the thick of family activity, for a few hours after dinner. I love the surprises, the revelations, the meditations, the dialogues, and the debates that writing provokes.

"To support my writing habit, I am the Academic Advisor and Outreach Coordinator for the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts, a CREC magnet high school in Hartford, Connecticut. The artistry of my colleagues and the raw talent of our students, combined with my community of family and friends, is the wellspring for my writing."

-
Like Fire Catching Wind review


Like Fire Catching Wind
Lynn Hoffman
Antrim House 2006
www.antrimhousebooks.com
ISBN- 978-009762091-8-8
$16.00

By JON ANDERSEN
Special to The Cool Justice Report

EDITOR'S NOTE: This review is available for reprint courtesy of The Cool Justice Report, http://cooljustice.blogspot.com

Someone is going to use the word transcendent or some variation of that misty word to praise Lynn Hoffman’s poetry – poetry that moves through history, through check-out lines, through the juvenile court system in Connecticut to the mountains of Colombia and the theology beyond.

But let me state right now that I will be willing to debate anyone who dares try to peg Like Fire Catching Wind with transcendence, even if it’s Harold Bloom himself. (Maybe especially if it’s Harold Bloom. Hoffman’s poems do not attempt to levitate over her own or anyone else’s reality – they dive into life as it is; they demand that we see the magic of everyday living in all its bizarre pain and joy.

These are poems of an engaged, reflective life. The quest never leads to spiritual flight; rather we are asked to face up. In the poem “Choosing,” Hoffman addresses a mother who has abandoned her child for life with a lover in Vegas – a life of addiction and squalor. Even trying to earn redemption – conquering the booze and squalor, trying to reconnect – the mother must realize that her children “may not want to let go/ of the red-hot rage/that’s been seething inside/ever since the day/you chose him.” The devastating line break at the beginning of the stanza reminds us that abandoned children will hold onto their rage as tenaciously as they once tried to hold on to their parents.

If there is no transcendence in Hoffman’s poems, there is plenty of room for inspired transformation. “Reversal” is brilliant poem that – in a public wrestling match --takes on all the boys “who think nothing/of pinning a girl/to a wall/or a mattress/ or the front seat/ of your Daddy’s Beamer” and forces them “to face us/and the possibility/that today/just might be the day/we take you down/ and your all-male world/ because you just can’t handle/ being pinned/ by a girl/ in public.”

In the very next poem, “Small Talk,” the voice of the poem is that of a cashier moved to thank an older man who’s turned out to be a World War II veteran. In the moment before we realize this gratitude with the cashier, the man with his “deep-creased face/and milk blue eyes” adds “I fought with the Nazis.” We think we know what’s happening when we’re standing in the check out line with groceries, but we don’t. The poem ruptures the still surface to make us face reality. History – which we conceive of as abstract, cut off from our own reality – is grinding along right with us -- and because of us. “Small Talk,” indeed.

Like Fire Catching Wind is delightful in its authentic range. There are so many wonderful and galvanizing surprises. If you’re about to lay down any of your hard-earned dollars for a book of poems, make sure you put sixteen bucks toward this one, and read it! As Doug Anderson wrote “she’ll help you see.” And I’ll end on this little teaser – you’ll never experience the Department of Motor Vehicles the same way again.

Jon Andersen is the author of Stomp and Sing (Curbstone 2005), a book of image-studded lyrics of work, love, family, and class struggle. His poems have appeared in numerous publications, including The Cafe Review, Connecticut Review, The Progressive, and Rattle. He teaches, along with his wife and fellow writer Denise Abercrombie, at E.O. Smith High School in Storrs.

Poems By David Cappella [Who Is Among Poets & Writers March 10 At Fiddleheads]

David Cappella lives in the town of Manchester, CT. He is an Associate Professor of English at Central Connecticut State University. He has co-authored two books on the teaching of poetry with Baron Wormser: Teaching the Art of Poetry: The Moves (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000) and A Surge of Language: Teaching Poetry Day to Day (Heinemann, 2004). He is the winner of the 2004 Bright Hill Press Poetry Chapbook Competition, of which the first poem was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He has published poems in The Connecticut Review, The Bryant Literary Review, Diner and other journals.

Cappella is one of several poets and writers who will be appearing Saturday, March 10, at Fiddleheads Natural Supermarket in Litchfield. Other poets and writers on the bill include Jim Scrimgeour, Tom Hazuka, Ravi Shankar and Elizabeth Thomas. Opening for the poets and writers will be a jazz combo made up of local teenagers.

Fiddleheads Market

Love like a stone

I have sunk to the bottom of my heart.
Like a stone picked up from an old gravel road,
tossed into a fast-flowing stream,
mired in river bottom mud.

The current that washes over me, perhaps
forever, washes me in regret.
I love a woman who does not love me.

You pick up a stone, sun-warm, dry
to the touch, from the gravel road.
You fling it into the rushing stream.

Changed forever, it lies below
the surface, irrevocably altered, but a stone
still, granite, intact, invisible as a soul.
I changed a stone the way love changed me.


The Walnut

Consider the walnut
its crenellation, its meat
like a miniature human brain
that you chew; a nut
that imitates a cerebellum.

Consider the flesh of the brain
which you will never see
except as splotches of color
on a CAT scan prior to diagnosis
of cancer, if you are diagnosed
with brain cancer, or are, instead,
told that your headaches,
stress related, can be controlled.

Consider how the flesh of the brain
responds to the positive news
that today you have not been told
that you will surely die,
though some people, a lucky few,
do, in fact, survive brain cancer
but not the daughter of a colleague
who withered away after months,
eighteen to be exact, of various treatments
and you had coffee with him,
her father, and watched him cry
every Friday between sips
over the fact that he would outlive
his darling, his beautiful darling,
only twenty-eight, and a nurse,
if you can believe so much in Fate.

Consider the softness of the brain exposed
how it was the spikes driven
into her head, the ones that shoot
streams of radioactive chemicals
to kill the tumor and the person, too.
He could not stop visualizing
the spikes, like a weird punk hairdo,
in his own brain. A type of crying, too.

Consider the walnut cracked open
two halves, broken, bicameral,
like consciousness is broken
when we cry, when we think
and feel simultaneously, when
we thank something called God
(whose brain we cannot envision)
that we are not dead, though
we can watch someone wish
he could die, could give his life
in place of his daughter's.

Consider the taste of the walnut
slightly bitter, not as bitter
as the father's view of life
at this moment, crying and
alone with Fate. The walnut
flesh softly breaks in your mouth,
the earthy tang deepens
as you chew the meat;
it sweetens slowly, you swallow,
instinctively reach for a glass
of Montepulciano to complement
the subtle, nutty taste, a combination
that soothes your brain, which,
had it been cracked open
and closely inspected,
would not look like meat
of a walnut at all, but would
look like a hardened mass of gray,
crenellated clay folds, inedible,
except to other animals, maybe,
though gourmands eat the brains
of certain ruminants, would taste
like nothing, which no doubt is
how the coffee tastes to the father
whose quiet tears have not stopped
and who stares straight at you
to ask the unanswerable, "Why?"

New Poetry By Davyne Verstandig; A Sampling Of Fare March 10 At Fiddleheads

What remains after loving

these are the weeds of memory
thistle, fireweed and sweetgrass

you remain for me
a single word

in a language no one knows

it is not high autumn yet
i am already feeling
winter's sparseness

there will be fires

*
Davyne Verstandig, one of a growing list of poets and writers appearing March 10 at Fiddleheads Natural Supermarket in Litchfield,
is a lecturer in English and Creative Writing at the UConn Torrington Campus. She is also director of the Litchfield County Writers Project.

Fiddleheads Natural Supermarket

Verstandig has published two books of poetry, Pieces of the Whole and Provisions and has performed improvisational work “composing on the tongue” while painting simultaneously. She recently served on the board of Touchstone, a residential treatment facility for female juvenile offenders in Litchfield, Connecticut.
She has read her work throughout New England and at The Knitting Factory and Housing Works in New York.

Last additions to the lineup March 10 are Shouhua Qi and Robin Cullen.

Associate Professor of English at Western Connecticut State
University, Shouhua Qi -- known to his friends as Chi -- has
published extensively both in the United States and in China.

He is the author of Bridging the Pacific: Searching for Cross-Cultural Understanding
between the United States and China and more than ten other books.

His debut novel, When the Purple MountainBurns
(San Francisco: The Long River Press, 2005), is about the tragic
events that happened during the Rape of Nanking (his hometown) in the
winter of 1937-38. His screenplay based on the novel has been optioned
for production.

His latest publication Red Guard Fantasies and Other Stories, is a collection
of short stories about people caught in the turbulence of changes in today's China.

Among his works-in-progress is a novel about American Korean War POWs
who chose to go to China at the time of armistice (1953).

--
Robin Cullen

Excerpt from one of the 11 essays in the book Couldn't Keep it to Myself: Wally Lamb and the Women of York Correctional Institution.

Christmas in Prison by Robin Cullen


A crowd gathers to read the new bulletin--long faced women who look like children still waiting for a Santa who never showed. What the sign reallymeans is: No Christmas Presents delivered again this week.

Each Christmas in prison, the commissary sells overpriced holiday packages.These are the only “gifts’ we are allowed to receive. Folks on the outside place their orders and send money to be deposited in our accounts. An inmate can order a holiday package as well as give herself a Christmas present if no one else has. The cost is deducted from the wages she’s earned, between 75 cents and $2.25 per day for jobs ranging from food prep to janitorial to teacher’s aide service.

Even if I’d saved three weeks’ pay, I would only afford the lowest priced holiday offering, the “Health Package, “ which sells for $26. It contains Smartfood popcorn, reduced fat Oreos, Stella D0’ro diet breadsticks, and a small box of herbal teas. Herbal tea is not available during the year and I would love to have some, but I’m not willing to spend all that money for the rest of that junk food marketed as “healthy.” Last year I lucked out. Other women who’d received the herb tea but wouldn’t drink it gave me theirs. I made a dozen apple-cinnamon tea bags from last January through April..

..In 1997, the first of the three Christmases I’ve spent in jail, every woman on the maximum-security side of the compound found two bags of goodie soutside her cell door on Christmas morning. Santa had left me a big bluebag of pretzel rings and a “party size” bad of salsa flavored Doritos. Yuletide decorations were a little “thin” that year: two scrawny, artificial Christmas trees, absent of lights and presents. The one in the dining hall had faded decorations and foil limbs. It barely survived the women brushing by it on the way to the chow line. The tree in the visiting room was in worse shape - as defeated and sad as the seasonal “returnees,” those emaciated woman returning “home” to Niantic for the holidays, their faces ashen and drawn, their bodies decorated with old jailhouse tattoos. Names, signs, symbols, declarations of eternal love: the women here sometime mark themselves and each other with sewing needles, shoe polish and ink from the barrels of broken Bic pens. For Christmas dinner that year, we ate roast beef.

A year later, Christmas, 1998, there were no “secret Santa” bags of pretzels or tortilla chips outside our cell doors. But the trees were back, a little more debilitated than the year before. For Christmas dinner, we ate roast beef.

This past year, no junk food, no trees. We ate roast beef.

When the trumpet of the jubilee sounds on the day of atonement, the Old Testament promises, liberty will be proclaimed and every man shall be returned to his family. No man shall oppress another (Leviticus, 25). When Jesus preached in the synagogues at Nazareth, He said no one belonged at the celebration more than the poor, the blind, and the imprisoned (Luke 4. Pope John Paul has proclaimed 2000 the Jubilee Year. At York C.I., however, no one’s gotten the message. The trees have disappeared, the roast beef dinners endangered, and the “presents “ have been held up until the backup of money orders gets unclogged. We can't get out and Christmas is no longer allowedin. This is a maximum security facility.

Author's Note: At age 34, Robin Cullen was driving home from a wedding when she and hergirlfriend, a passenger in Cullen's truck, changed destination. Cullen became disoriented, entered the wrong side of a divided road and attempted unsuccessfully to correct her error. Her vehicle flipped over, killing her passenger. Cullen was subsequently convicted of "second-degree manslaughter with a motor vehicle, driving while intoxicated." She served three years of an eight-year sentence.

While incarcerated, Cullen served as a teacher's aide, a literacy volunteer, and a backup puppy trainer for the National Education of Assistance Dogs project. Additionally, she worked in date entry, coding accident reports for the Department of Transportation, seved as lector for Catholic Mass, earned college credits, and painted walls throughout the prison school including one classroom's four-sided mural of an enchanted garden.

Upon release, Cullen became certified through the Amherst Writers and Artists Institute to each therapeutic writing. Presently, she volunteers in weekly sessions at a halfway house, working with women just exiting prison.

She was also sole proprietor of her own painting company, Color Outside the Lines; she labors full-time through Connecticut, customizing homes inside and out.

Cullen currently works for Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

"I never thought it would happen to me," Cullen says of the accident that sent her to prison. "I am grateful for all the love in my life, and for the truth that sets me free."

The complete lineup for Fiddleheads on March 10 -- as of today -- follows:

· Ravi Shankar
· Tom Hazuka
· Elizabeth Thomas
· Ron Winter
· David Cappella
· Jim Scrimgeour
· Lynn Hoffman
· Davyne Verstandig
· Shouhua Qi
· Robin Cullen



Reception Entertainment by Jazz Combo:
Doug Slohm, bass; Ben Loomis, drums; Graham Meharg, piano;
Will Katzin, alto sax; Alex Gros, alto sax.
~

Books by
The Fabulous Rainy Faye
www.rainyfaye.com
georgia_f_day@sbcglobal.net

Rainy Faye Bookstore & Gallery

For background on the poets and writers,
Search Fiddleheads and / or the writers @ www.cooljustice.blogspot.com

New Fiction From Tom Hazuka

Editor’s Note: From the Cellar of the Ivory Tower appears in the Spring 07 edition of Connecticut Review.
Tom Hazuka is the author of over 30 short stories, former co-editor of Quarterly West magazine, and author of two novels, including In the City of the Disappeared (Bridge Works Publishing Company, Inc., 2000), which draws on his experiences in Chile with the Peace Corps between 1978 and 1980. A professor of English at Central Connecticut State University, Mr. Hazuka has co-edited two short story anthologies. He is also co-author of A Method To March Madness: An Insider’s Look At The Final Four.

Connecticut Review order form

Connecticut Review

From the Cellar of the Ivory Tower


TOM HAZUKA


My crisis of faith began rather typically, with a horrendous incident that made me wonder how any loving God could permit such a thing. But upon further review (not being predestined to believe in Calvinism), I took theology off the cosmic hook: the Almighty should not be the fall guy for my quixotic quest to find employment as a college teacher. It's my own damn fault.

My old college friend and bona fide human horsefly Chesterman looked at me pityingly. It was Saturday night at T.G.I. Friday's, and he was bemoaning over his third pint of microbrew the fact that he had slaved fifty hours that week. I was nursing my second mug of the cheapest swill on tap. I didn't get paid again until next week, and the rent was due on Tuesday.

"Not that I'm complaining," he said. "How could I, with the green I pull down?"

"Not that I ever stop complaining," I said. "But I work at least sixty hours a week."

Chesterman peered at me like I'd suggested boogeying naked on the bar. He ran his hand through hair that was receding almost as fast as mine. His face crimped into a mask of irritating dubiety, like the time he gave me forty bucks to write a history paper for him, then worried that it sounded too smart and the prof would flunk his cheating ass. He got his girl friend to retype it, with spelling mistakes and semiliterate grammar for authenticity.

"Spare me, you lazy bastard. You teach twelve stinking hours a week. Talk about the gravy train. My tax dollars at work."

I could have popped him one, but physical violence is not the way of the untenured academic. Intellectual violence, of course, is no-holds-barred, a sad necessity for us who live by our wits, and crumbs fallen from the master's table. (For proof, don a flak jacket one fine day and check out the vitriolic epistles at the back of The New York Review of Books.) So I dragged him through the straight facts à la Joe Friday, figuring they contained enough mayhem for even this jaded fan of Schwarzenegger.

"You want to know about the gravy train, old pal? OK, here goes, a typical day in the ivory tower. Up at six, skim newspaper, grade godforsaken freshman comp essays and prep for class, drive to the university to teach at ten and eleven, then office hours with a line of students bitching that their shitty essays that should have failed got C's instead of A's. A couple hours in the library writing and researching a new article, because if you don't publish you have no prayer of ever getting a tenured job. Then drive half an hour to the community college to teach more comp at three, where the students whine because you don't have their papers graded yet. Office hour there, where if you're lucky you can do some grading and prepping for tomorrow, but most likely a bunch of students will show up. Leave at rush hour, or work for another hour or two at school and wait for traffic to thin out. At home you can try to relax, except nights when you have to teach another class, but chances are you can't forget those stacks of essays still to grade. Don't worry, there'll be plenty of them left to kill your weekend. And in the fall like now there's another delight: applying with thousands of other desperate, equally qualified people for a 'real' full-time job."

"What do you mean, 'real'?" Chesterman was dry and trying to catch the bartender's eye. I still had a few tepid ounces to my name, and I was determined to make them last.

"I mean a tenure-track job that pays better than two thousand dollars a course--"

"Two measly grand? You gotta be shitting me."

"--and actually has medical benefits and a retirement plan."

"You don't have any insurance?"

"No way, Massa. Part-time teachers get no benefits, just the shaft, like temp workers in industry. We're the Kelly Girls of academia."

Chesterman let out a low whistle, shaking his head.

"Hey," I told him as snottily as possible. "What do you expect for only twelve hours of work a week? But at least I'm on the short list at Southwest Appalachia Tech. I might get an interview."

"Never heard of it."

"Neither had I."

"What's it pay?"

I know I'm a man of the mind, to whom material objects are immaterial. Still, I felt a dyspeptic pang to admit the paltry truth. "Almost thirty," I said, exaggerating by only three thousand.

"Thirty K! After six years of grad school? Our interns make that much. Man, your life really sucks. Let me buy you a beer."

"I don't need your charity," I responded nobly.

Chesterman put a reassuring hand on my shoulder. "Don't kid yourself, Malone. Of course you do."

High above the dinosaur spine of the Appalachian mountains, Chesterman's question echoed in what remained of my Ph.D.-brutalized brain: "Why do you do it?" He had asked it later that night in the bar, before we moved on to less depressing topics like how we'd been celibate since the summer (actually for me it was early spring--but close enough), and at the time I had no more coherent answer than the truth: Because it's the job I want. Because I love teaching. The plane hit another air pocket, and my stomach lurched. Why in the name of all that is holy did I eat those verdigris sausage links on the last flight? Had I no sense of self-preservation? With that existential question foremost in my mind I peered out the horribly scratched window of the bucking commuter deathtrap, one of those eight-seat torture tubes where you have to duck low just to crawl to your seat. But it was the only connection I could find to Blackwater County Airport, twenty-one winding, switchback miles distant from the metropolis of Anthracite City, population 12,301 and falling, proud home of the Southwest Appalachia Tech Fightin' Canaries.

I'm not sure who I expected would pick me up at the airport, but it definitely wasn't a sixty-year-old woman with cat's-eye glasses and a blue beehive hairdo, expertly rolling a cigarette with one hand while the other displayed a hunk of cardboard with my name scrawled on it. The "E" at the end was tiny and crooked, and still barely fit. I wondered whose secretary she was, and how they had bribed her to make this trip.

"You Malone?" she asked, as if hoping I wasn't.

Seeing no alternative, I admitted as much.

She scoped me critically, head to toe. "Gladys Rupp," she said. "How's it hangin'?"

"Fine," I lied.

She nodded at my crotch. "Barn door's open."

Blushing furiously, I zipped up. Meanwhile she commandeered my suitcase and refused to relinquish it, striding out the tiny terminal and across the acned landscape of the parking lot, me fighting to keep up and feeling hopelessly unchivalrous carrying just a garment bag containing the only suit I own. With her in front I surreptitiously checked my fly again, just as she turned around and caught me. She squinted and wrinkled her nose.

"A guy in Sociology got fired for that stuff," she said.

Her red, mid-70's Ford pickup looked like it had seen major use at the local quarry. Gladys swung my suitcase up and into the bed without bothering to lower the tailgate. "What are you waitin' for, an invitation? Get in 'less you're plannin' on stayin'. It ain't like we lock our doors 'round here. Ain't like the city--folks is friendly."

She tossed the sign with my name on it on the seat between us, and I saw it had been hewn from an Old Milwaukee twelve-pack. Behind the wheel, she relit her cigarette and puffed up a huge cancer cloud before starting the engine. Gladys looked at me sidelong as she crunched into first gear.

"At least you're not quite as peaked as the last one they brought in. I've never seen such a sickly snippet of a girl. 'Take your nose out of a book once in a while, child," I says to her. "Get outside and fill your lungs with the fresh air the Lord Jesus gave you.'"

Gladys sucked on her cigarette. The cab was beginning to resemble a scene in a Cheech and Chong movie. As someone who'd do almost anything for a job, suffer almost any indignity--and bereft of any other interviews--I fought to maintain and didn't tell her about my asthma.

"Do you mind if I crack my window?" I asked.

"I'd rather you just rolled it down." Gladys guffawed and slapped her blue-jeaned thigh. Which was one thing. But then she reached over and slapped mine. "Hell no, suit yourself, Tony!"

I cringed. My name is Anthony. Call me Ant if you're absolutely in the grip of a nickname fetish, but not Tony. Never Tony. Tony Malone sounds like a guy you'd hire to break some schlub's kneecaps, and though I was desperate for a job I wasn't that desperate. The only nickname I've ever had--The Bong Show--I earned in high school, but I gratefully outgrew that a couple million brain cells ago.

We drove for miles on a winding, pitted two-lane road, steadily climbing through some of the lushest, most gorgeous mountain scenery I'd ever seen.

"God's country," Gladys said, smoke trailing like two tails from her nostrils. "I ain't never wanted to live nowhere else."

I rolled down the window another six inches and edged my nose farther into the breeze.

"So you're from around here?" I asked, figuring the odds of it being otherwise were roughly equal to having Yale and Stanford locked in a bidding war for my services. Lighter teaching load, Dr. Malone? Consider it done. An endowed chair? Generous moving allowance? Anything else we can do for you? Free T-shirts from the bookstore? A masseuse between classes? And of course fly first class on your campus visit.

"Born and raised in Blackwater County, Tony. Course I grew up in a holler in the hills, on a two-horse tobacco farm, but I always wanted them bright lights. So as soon as Ma and Pa wasn't big enough to hold me down no more I lit out for the city. Been livin' in Anthracite ever since."

Heavenly Father, deliver me from evil. For solace I looked down the embankment to the river, riffles and pools everywhere, a fly fisherman's delight. That could be salvation enough, I mused, idyllic Thoreauvian hours spent flailing the water, stalking the wily and elusive piscene prince, the native brown trout. Could one's soul truly need more?

"How's the fishing?" I asked, with a nod toward the ravine.

Gladys shrugged. "Decent in the mountains. Down there in the Blackwater the fish was all poisoned by runoff from the mines. Gits 'em like the Black Lung gits people, only faster. Nothin' in there now 'cept maybe a carp or catfish by the dam, but you won't catch me eatin' 'em. No sir, they's already enough cancer in my family."

We drove along in silence--blithe on her part, stunned on mine--until a string of peeling billboards blotted the landscape. ANTHRACITE CITY, proclaimed the first, WHERE THE FOLKS DON'T BITE, THE FISH DO.

Gladys spit a few flecks of tobacco on the dashboard. "You don't much care how many fish go belly-up, if your alternative is a pink slip."

ANTHRACITE CITY, said the second, A NICE PLACE TO BE FROM.

I realized I was sitting on my hands, and liberated them against their will.

The third sign was possibly the most intriguing:

ANTHRACITE CITY
BIRTHPLACE OF BOBO KILGORE

"Who," I inquired, feeling like a trout rising to a badly-tied fly, "is Bobo Kilgore?"

"Who's Bobo Kilgore!" Gladys sounded as nonplussed as the department chair would be if I asked during my interview, " Who's this Shakespeare guy you keep talking about?"

"Don't you listen to country and western, Tony? Torch and twang? The music of the people?"

"Not much," I confessed, assuming that was a more politic response than, "Not unless I've had a lobotomy lately."

Gladys reacted like a true Christian, a fundamentalist one I was sure. "Well, you've got a Ph.D., I guess you can learn. Bobo hit number one on the country charts in '64 with "When I Said Send C.O.D., I Didn't Mean A Fish." But the Beatles came to America and siphoned off a lot of his fans. It happened to many a talented artist at that time. Timing is everything, Tony. Everything."

She nodded sagely, and lowered her voice as if the cabin of the pickup were bugged.

"Like you," she confided. "You've got timing. The department secretary misplaced the ad for your job, so it only went in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, not the Modern Language Association job list, and barely 125 people applied. The search committee had been expecting more like 600."

Nothing like being lucky enough to duke it out with just 125 candidates instead of five times that many. If you get the impression there are more qualified English teachers than places for them to work, you're not mistaken. I was going to ask Gladys a couple of pointed questions, such as "Aren't you the department secretary?" and "What happened to your Beverly Hillbillies accent?", but we hit the city limits, as announced by our passing beneath an ersatz Arc de Triomphe constructed entirely of gleaming hubcaps. ANTHRACITE CITY, read the sheet-metal letters curving along the crown of the arch. HUB OF BLACKWATER COUNTY.

"All done with donations on private time," Gladys crowed with civic pride. "Not a penny of public money."

"Very, um, nice," I said, fighting not to choke on my own spit as the grim reality speared me that yes, no matter what, in the unlikely event they offered me this godforsaken job, I would take it. At a certain unmentionable point, a person will take anything. Almost. Anything.

Gladys interrupted my cheery ruminations. "You up for seeing the campus now, Tony, or should I just drop you off at the motel?"

It was an easy decision. Wouldn't you want to shower and look your best to meet your potential new colleagues? I stood naked on the mustard shag carpet, toweling off as I marveled at the shiny orange foil floral wallpaper, festooned with two-dimensional garlands of glaucous orchids hanging from Corinthian columns. If nothing else, I comforted myself, I had learned something today--before entering that room, I never knew such a commodity existed. I was a more complete person now. Maybe I would be a better teacher, especially to students who hailed from a place where such decoration was presumably considered normal--in the name of all that is holy, possibly even highbrow.

I surveyed the faded lemon chenille bedspread with its fusillade of cigarette burns, upon which twenty minutes ago Gladys had stowed my bag and plopped herself for a hearty couple of bounces. She grinned lubriciously.

"Not too squeaky, Tony. In case you get lucky."

I was still damp when someone knocked at the door. I rushed to finish drying myself.

"Who is it?" I asked, fairly certain it wasn't a representative of the hotel management with a complimentary fruit basket or mints for my pillow.

A tired voice seeped into the room. "You don't know me from Adam, but I might be the most important person you'll ever meet. Open up."

The weird thing was, those words that should have seemed so urgent, didn't. They were like a sickly flashlight beam from nearly dead batteries. Replace, I thought. Replace or recharge before sinking into darkness. Before the night takes over.

"Be right there. I just got out of the shower."

"Don't worry. I'm a male. There's nothing untoward here." Then, lower, so low I couldn't be positive I heard it, a muttered, "There never is."

I threw on some clothes (nothing casual, all I had was dress-up, interview stuff) and opened the door--a cautious crack at first, then wide when I saw that the most important person I would ever meet had the demeanor and appearance of a basset hound. Even his command was timid.

"Let me in," he said. "Before Gladys sees me."

As I stepped back and he slipped inside, I noticed again the imposing, purple neon-rimmed sign in front of the motel.

THE STRIP MINE
RO MS TOLET--DAY OR WEEK

I shuddered and closed the door behind me. Basset hound man cowered in front of the black and silent TV screen, non-existent tail drooping flaccidly between his legs.

"Listen, friend, don't do it."

"What are you talking about? I'm here to interview for a job at the college."

"That. That's what I'm talking about." For the first time, a hint of anguished energy tinged his voice. "You don't want to come here. It's death. Don't make the mistake I did. Choose life."

"You work at the school?"

I wondered if the tic twitching his cheek had just started, or had been there all along and I somehow hadn't noticed.

"Seventeen years," he intoned morosely. "In the history department."

"Those who don't learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them," I said to make small talk.

Spasms rippled the left side of his body. "You do understand! Flee while there's still hope!"

"I appreciate your concern," I said, not so discreetly edging him back where he came from. "But you'll have to excuse me. The chair of the department is picking me up any minute."

"Gott im Himmel," he said, making for the exit under his own steam. "Gladys!"

I must admit that surprised me. "Will she be there too?"

"Oh, you naif! You innocent! Gladys is the chair of the English department!"
Horrified incomprehension must have disfigured my face. My savior placed a trembling hand on my shoulder.

"Come to my room for whiskey later. You'll need it. The water of life--I never allow my supply to run dry. Number 14. This place is like an elevator--no number 13. We don't want any ill luck now, do we?" With a dispirited cackle he peered out to see if the coast was clear.

"You live here?" I said, mortified to a degree I would not have thought possible twenty-four hours ago.

"It was a promise to myself, a symbol that this was just temporary. That I would move to a better job at the first opportunity." A heart-rending groan escaped his lips. "That was seventeen years ago. The opportunity never came, for me or for anyone else, and it never will. We are all entombed here, the walking academic dead."

He made his weary escape without looking back. I had never seen shoulders so stooped, so battered by gravity. He looked like one of Dali's melting clocks, with legs, wandering the earth as the seconds ticked off louder and louder in his head, one by one by one.

I woke the next day with the wretched feeling that life would improve, at least marginally, if I could only manage to vomit. But I couldn't achieve that feat at The Strip Mine, despite plunging several fingers almost to my uvula, and during my morning interviews with the dean and the president it did not seem good policy to continue the effort. I acquitted myself more or less sensibly with them, I think, despite my plague-like symptoms and an inability to dispel a question hammering my brain in syncopation to a colossal headache: What in God's name happened last night after Winston Pulpo, the department poet who had not been published since the Nixon administration, ordered that second pitcher of kamikazes? From that moment until regaining consciousness at dawn on the motel bathroom floor, still wearing my suit and wing tips but somehow no socks, the evening was a jagged, mossy blank.

Please do not assign Freudian implications to any of this, subconscious desires to sabotage my candidacy or whatever. Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe, and sometimes one flirts with self-destruction in one direction in order to avoid it from another. We had hardly been seated at The Ground Cow, when groin-punch remarks about earlier candidates and their "sissy" (the politest of a plethora of adjectives) insistence on liver salvation made it plain that without a wholesale Hemingway imitation, I had no prayer of impressing these people.

Melvin Gastric, the department medievalist, chortled at my response to a question about exercise that I occasionally jog a few miles. He exhaled a fumatory stream from his Tiparillo, lifted his third beer and bore it aloft like the Olympic torch.

"Me pump iron," he said. "Twelve-ounce weights."

I considered pointing out that he was hoisting liquid and glass, not iron, but catching the search committee chair in a mixed metaphor is not high on the accepted list of things to do to get a job.

"Pump this, Gastric," said a surly guy in a bad toupee whose name already escaped me. "You make me sick."

"Now boys," Gladys said, blowing smoke in Toupee's face. "Let's be on our best behavior for Tony here."

Gastric drained his beer and groped behind him for the waitress. "Why?" he asked, genuinely puzzled. "Is reality too much for him?" He turned toward me. "Is reality too much for you?"

"I--"

"Kamikaze time!" Winston Pulpo sang out. He lit yet another Chesterfield with the butt of his last one. Nudging me with his elbow he whispered unctuously, "Kamikazes smooth everything out. You'll see. It's not so bad. It could be worse. Really."

Who was I to call a man I'd never met before--a man who might one day be my colleague--a liar?

"Lies, damned lies, and statistics!" growled Gladys, apropos of nothing I could discern. She took a lusty quaff of her Bacardi 151 and Cherry Coke.

Gastric narrowed his eyes. "What's your take on the Socratic Method, Tony?"

"I--"

"If he doesn't take at least twenty-five percent off the top, he's an idiot!"

The table roared at Toupee's witticism, then drowned their collective mirth in booze on the taxpayers' tab. Whenever my alcohol consumption failed to meet expectations, muttered imprecations about Oscar Wilde and lack of cojones assaulted my ears. It wouldn't have been so bad if it wasn't usually Gladys talking. I wanted to order a chef's salad, but under the cirumstances opted for a sanguinary slab of prime rib--ordered, à la Gastric, "Still mooing." I hadn't eaten beef in five years, and for all I knew the next morning my streak was still intact, because the second pitcher of kamikazes arrived before the entrees did, and that's the last thing I remember.

I left the president's office after an intellectually challenging chat about how his new set of golf clubs had shaved five strokes off his handicap. When he asked if I liked to "chase the little white ball around the links" I judiciously lied and said yes, but the truth is I loathe the game. According to Einstein golf is "a good walk wasted," and I think he was smart enough to know. On my way back to the English department I wandered around campus, trying to regroup body and soul. Imagine every generic circa-1965 brick and glass classroom building you've ever seen, scatter a dozen of them on the remnants of a hillside that must have been gorgeous before the strip mining, and bear in mind that when the state legislature takes its annual cleaver to higher ed funding, the maintenance budget is the first to feel the blade. I saw squirrels and birds nesting in the rotten eaves of the administration building, frolicking as if some generous God had designed it just for them.

The English department was on the fourth floor of Bobo Kilgore Hall; you needed a key to take the elevator so I trudged up the steps, fighting vertigo and nausea while struggling to recall if I'd done anything last night that would make today's hoop-jumping a big fat moot point. A bell rang infernally close to my ear and students poured into the stairwell, most wearing caps turned backward in order to resemble what were called, in my naive and politically incorrect youth, "retards." The only difference between them and my current students was that instead of baseball or university logos, these caps advertised seed companies and tractor manufacturers.

I exited the horde a floor early to try again to purge myself, but at a discreet distance from the English department. The third floor housed Modern Languages, and I've never seen a school yet where it mattered to anyone what those people thought. I gave my tie an Isadora Duncan fling behind my neck to protect it and probed deep with two fingers. But to no avail. I could not spew, and ceased my vain gagging when a voice entered spouting angry phonemes in a language I couldn't identify, but surely came from a land where men have slaughtered each other since the Dark Ages to convince their neighbors to worship God correctly. As I left the stall a back as broad as a sack of cement was hulking over the urinal. Words--I assume they were words--were still hurtling like righteous bullets as I got out of there.

I was supposed to go to lunch at noon with some teachers at the Faculty Dining Room, and to my churning belly's horror the hour was fast approaching. I climbed to the fourth floor and began the Long Walk down the hall to the chair's--or as Gladys insisted, chairman's--office. Suddenly I heard a hissing sound.

"Psst! My friend!"

I peered into the office to my left, and saw an assegai and leopard pelt on the wall but no owner of the voice.

"Do come in," it said, sounding like a Congolese James Earl Jones. "I do not bite."

I did as I was bid--anything to postpone lunch for a while--and discovered behind the half-open door a long Black ectomorph dangling head-down from a pair of gravity boots. His dreadlocks trailed on the stained linoleum. He extended a hand that required several contortions for me to connect with. It was the first time I had shaken hands with a man while at eye-level with his crotch.

"How did you see me?" I asked.

He nodded toward the corner, where a convex mirror rested on a file cabinet.

"I want to know if I am about to be assaulted. As a Black and a foreigner, the regional Ku Klux Klan chapter has no love for me."

"Why not close the door?"

I'd never seen an upside-down sneer before.

"Politics," he almost spat. "Some malcontents bitched and now we not only have to hold office hours, we have to leave the door open and unlocked. Next they will expect a goddamn welcome mat and lollipops for being good boys and girls."

Such seemingly irate sentiments were delivered in a very un-American fashion: without heat, in a sonorous basso profundo.

"Friend," he said. "I have terrible news. They like you. They're going to offer you the job."

"If it's so bad, why are you here?"

"Because if I return to my country I would be shot on sight. That is if I am lucky. More likely I would be tortured for many months and then hanged."

That revelation certainly gave me some perspective. "Seems like an excellent reason to me," I said.

"You, on the other hand," he continued. "Surely you have options."

I briefly considered them. They brought me no joy.

"I need a job," I said. "Bad."

"Don't do this to yourself. You will be teaching three freshman composition sections per semester. Plus huge sophomore surveys."

"I do that now."

"But not to these students!"

"Oh, come on. I've dealt with the bottom."

He trembled in his upside-down boots. "You have a great distance to drop yet. Behold! Feast your eyes!"

I followed his ebony finger to a stack of papers on the desk. I picked up the top one, a little cocky despite my queasiness. When it came to student essays, after all, I'd seen everything.

Until now.

The Poeple Off My High School

There are many diferent types of groups off poeple in the high school that I atended. thier is basicly four diferent types off groups of poeple that can all ways be found to-gether. Namely; they are the Jox, the book-Worms, The stoners, and the neegros.

I couldn't continue. "Good God," I told him. "You win."

"I may be an animist," he cried. "But as the local Bible-thumpers say, I feel as if I have just done a Christian thing."

"Shalom," I said as I walked out.
* * *

At lunch Skeeter Gilchrist, who applied himself to linguistics, regaled me with tales of his deviant fraternity days. At least that's what I initially thought, until several sordid references indicated half this stuff had occurred after he was on the university payroll. Like Gladys and a dismaying percentage of the overall faculty, Skeeter had acquired his B.A. and M.A. at SWAT (a Ph.D. had only become requisite in the past decade, so fewer than twenty percent of teachers held them). He was innocent of any other academic environment, and could conceive of nothing finer. Skeeter was a lifer.

The table had just erupted in guffaws at his anecdote about switching the temporary markers at two freshly dug graves, leaving a pair of corpses to rot misidentified for eternity, when my belly staged its final rebellion. I know not whether it was the tuna melt or the side of creamed spinach, but the consequences were Vesuvian. I excused myself and bolted. Fortunately the men's room was right next door, and after voiding my system in a torrential upchuck I did feel slightly better.

Until I walked back into the Faculty Dining Room.

The place had fallen silent as the tomb. Then it came--scattered snickers, a few unbridled yucks--and the awful truth hit me like a hurled assegai: that bathroom wall was neither thick nor soundproof. Skeeter was red-faced from trying to stifle his mirth. He gave up, and started spluttering.

"Don't worry, Tony, it's happened to all of us, even Iron Guts Gladys. They don't call this the Faculty Dying Room for nothing!"

Cissy Sue Gummoe, who taught fiction writing on the strength of having published two stories à clé in now-defunct literary magazines I'd never heard of (and who, she proudly informed me, had once received a signed rejection note from Playboy), sympathetically stroked my thigh beneath the table.

"At least he didn't make it the Faculty Whining Room, like most of us," she said. "Without a word of complaint, Tony went off and did his business in private."

Despite a Herculean effort, Skeeter couldn't control himself.

"Oh, right," he said, tears leaking down his cheeks. "Real private!"

Woe was general over all dire land. I excused myself on the pretext of a meeting with Gladys, but Cissy Sue insisted on escorting me across campus, hanging heavy on my arm in the process. I quickly learned she was president of the local Bobo Kilgore fan club, though the artist himself seemed to have forsaken the area, and currently ran an empire of used car lots and exotic dancer emporia in Alabama.

"Bobo played his first gig right here in Anthracite City," she said breathlessly, as a man-mountain lumbered by in a sweatshirt with a football and an assault rifle silk-screened beneath the words SWAT TEAM. "And the folks loved him. It was in the Grange Hall, at a KKK rally. I'm not saying that's the ideal venue, but a young man on the make has to seize his opportunities where he finds them."

Ms. Gummoe tightened her grip on my arm. She winked at me, then again with the other eye in case I hadn't caught it the first time.

"Beggars can't be choosers," she said. "If you know what I mean." And winked once more.

The sad fact is I knew exactly what she meant, and I thought about it all the way to the airport. I did not want this job, this sojourn in academic purgatory--but knew that I'd accept it in a heartbeat if the offer came. No matter what anyone claimed, there was always the possibility, however tenuous, of eventually moving on to something marginally decent. At least I wouldn't have to commute among three campuses any more. And I'd have health insurance, in case I caught a dreadful disease. Or, more likely, needed a sojourn in a padded cell.

"Please don't feel as if you have to escort me to the gate," I told Gladys.

"Don't worry," she said, "I don't," and drove straight to the terminal curb.

"It's been a pleasure," I forced myself to say. "I was very--impressed."

"Don't call us, we'll call you."

My crest must have fallen, because she grinned and slapped me on the shoulder.

"Just kidding, Tony, just kidding!"

Her face went serious. Yesterday's Tobacco Road accent suddenly reappeared.

"Ironic, ain't it? A gal like me from the backwoods with somethin' you and a slew of other city slickers would give your left you-know-what to have."

"What's that?" I asked, expecting some corny ear-bath about peace of mind or the sweet smell of cow flops in the morning.

Gladys hesitated a strategic second, cigarette erect in her teeth like FDR in a Huck Finn phase.

"A tenured college teaching job, Bubba. Have a good flight."

I watched the windsock spastically swirling on its pole and knew better. I noisily filled a distress bag and made a handful of lifetime enemies on the commuter flight, then pulled a repeat performance on the jet home.

"I'm back in the U.S.S.R.," Paul McCartney kept crooning somewhere behind my eyelids. "You don't know how lucky you are, boy...."

Then came three weeks of neurotic agony. Every day I waited for The Call. Grasping at every conceivable straw, I even crafted a new message with a bit of a drawl for my answering machine. Finally, returning to the apartment at nine-thirty after teaching my night class, I saw the SWAT school seal--De Profundis Profunditas --among a pile of bills and offers from stock gurus to make me a millionaire.

Instead of exulting, my heart sank. A letter meant I was an also-ran; a letter meant someone else had taken the job. Hoping against hope, I ripped open the envelope.


Dear Applicant:

Anticipated funding for the tenure-track Assistant Professor position has not been realized and the search, regrettably, has been discontinued. Thank you for our interest in Southwest Appalachia Tech, and we wish you continued success in your academic career.

That was it. Not even a handwritten "Sorry" from Gladys, not even a signature. "Continued success"! Whose idea was it to insert that dagger? Oh Cosmic Joker, show some mercy.

Maybe I'll see Chesterman at the bar this weekend and engage him in an eschatological discussion. Or at least a scatological one. Maybe I'll find some answers to The Meaning of Life. It can't be any harder than finding a tenure-track teaching job. In the meantime, if you ever buy a used car from Bobo Kilgore, please wish the man continued success. And if the spirit moves, go next door and stick a dollar in a G-string for me.